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Steve MaraboliEmpty Your Cup...
One of my favorite stories concerns famed martial artist, Bruce Lee, and his desire to be trained by a local Master. At the time, Bruce had extensive fight experience and a background in martial arts training. He approached the Master, and after making the customary bows, asked him to be his teacher.
At that time, Bruce began to talk about his experience and rambled on and on about the many fights he had won. The Master listened patiently and then began to make tea. When it was ready, he poured the tea into Bruce’s cup. As Bruce watched, the cup slowly filled until it began to overflow, first on to the table and then on to the floor. While trying to be respectful Bruce couldn’t hold it in any longer and shouted, “Stop, stop! The cup is full; you can’t get any more in.”
The master stopped pouring and said, “You are like this cup; you are full of ideas and opinions. You come and ask for teaching, but your cup is full; I can’t put anything in. Before I can teach you, you will have to empty your cup.”
This story is an old one that surely has been retold throughout the generations, but it continues to be played out in our day-to-day lives. We are so enamored of our own ideas and opinions, and so trapped by our conditioning that we fill ourselves up to the brim and nothing new can get in. Empty your cup!
Throughout my own life I’ve noticed that I have had to empty my cup, haven’t you? I’ve noticed that in our own lives we sometimes get in our own way because we think we’re experts at something. Because of this, we become judgers instead of analyzers. We become filled with our own ideas, judgments, and opinions that keep us from learning and processing new information.
If you allow it, life can be a very interesting and dynamic process of learning. Life is a journey; it’s a process that presents us with new stimulus every single day, new ideas every single day, new occurrences every single day.
If you’re in a relationship, there are new dynamics that reveal themselves every single day. The good news is, you have the capacity to experience all of it, or most of it. The bad news is, you very rarely will because your cup is still full of past experiences… Past drama, past labels, past truths, that have rendered you incapable of being open to the new dynamics, the new stimulus of your life and of your journey.
How would your life benefit from emptying your cup right now? Emptying your cup from your past relationships, from your past dramas, from your past betrayals, from your past judgments. Imagine how your life could benefit from this!
Empty your cup! Empty your cup of the idea that you’re not in charge of your life. Empty your cup of the idea that you can’t change the world around you. Empty your cup of the idea that you are powerless to refine and improve your life. Empty your cup of those habits, ideas, and philosophies that hinder your ability to experience, learn, and enjoy all the new dynamics this journey reveals to you.
- Steve Maraboli
"Unapologetically You" https://www.amazon.com/Unapologetically-You-Re…/…/0979575087
Comments
I had no opinion of Steve Maraboli before I read this, because I'd never heard of him. Then I had a slightly unfavorable opinion of him because he makes shit up. Having checked him out (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Maraboli), it seems he's just another self-help huckster making a fat profit off the despair of the simple by pitching them recycled platitudes.
His banal, self-satisfied riff on the 'empty your cup' story is a case in point. To be totally honest, it's so wrong-headed that it makes me want to slap him silly. For one thing, Zen stories are not meant to be pontificated-on as if they were sermon-seeds: either they stand alone or they don't, and this one has stood over a century (http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/1acupoftea.html). But the main reason I want to slap him is for his callous indifference to suffering.
"Empty your cup!" as if it were just that easy; fie! Try "Empty your cement-mixer" after it's sat un-emptied for several decades! Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all wake up in the morning and just decide not to have our early maladaptive schemas (http://www.ijpsy.com/volumen13/num1/350/early-maladaptive-schemas-and-interpersonal-EN.pdf) any longer? Woohoo! All those people doing therapy and taking medication and struggling to get through their day without killing themselves could just tune in Steve Maraboli on the radio, empty their cups and live happily ever after!
No, y'know what? I want to slap him with a shovel. Better still, I want to equip all the folk I look after with Point-of-View Guns (http://alienencyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Point_of_View_Gun) and have them blast this smug cliche-master into a total melt-down with the reality of suffering one can't just decide not to experience.
(Ack, sorry, hon; the Rant Machine is a little hair-trigger this morning, because several of my folk aren't doing so well, and no amount of newage slogans will help them.)
Edited 2017-04-15 07:41 pm (UTC)
You make good points; but you see, unlike you and--apparently--many others, I had not come across the "empty your cup" injunction before, and so it interested me, given some prior experiences I'd had.
Thank you again for all the info, and I hope your folks do better, to the extent possible.